"Are We Rome?"

[From last Friday, in Istanbul]:

On the plane over here I read a fascinating new book that I highly recommend for readers of this blog who are interested in history, morals and cultural change: "Are We Rome?" by Cullen Murphy. The author examines the parallels between the Late Roman Empire and latter-day America, with an eye toward discerning what lessons the United States could learn from the fate of the Western Empire, in hopes of avoiding its fate. I made a bunch of notes on the plane, which I'll throw out there for conversation. Unless otherwise noted, all lines in italics are taken from the book.

1. "A republic sustained by flinty yeomen had become a precarious autocracy administered by grasping bureaucrats." Murphy says in the end, the sense of personal responsibility and republican virtue that sustained Rome for so long had decayed into a sense that the common good should be sustained by the bureaucracy, which was run by a patronage system. This put me immediately in mind of a 2006 paper by Fredo Arias-King, a former foreign policy adviser to ex-Mexico president Vicente Fox, who warned that unchecked immigration from Mexico risks importing the patronage mentality into American political culture. He wrote that of the 80 US lawmakers he met with as part of a Fox delegation during the Mexican presidential race, almost all of them favored a liberalized immigration system -- though they were not honest with their own constituents about this. Here's Arias-King, on "the possibility that the debate could yet be framed in terms of potential usurpation from the political class using immigration as a tool.":

While Democratic legislators we spoke with welcomed the Latino vote, they seemed more interested in those immigrants and their offspring as a tool to increase the role of the government in society and the economy. Several of them tended to see Latin American immigrants and even Latino constituents as both more dependent on and accepting of active government programs and the political class guaranteeing those programs, a point they emphasized more than the voting per se. Moreover, they saw Latinos as more loyal and "dependable" in supporting a patron-client system and in building reliable patronage networks to circumvent the exigencies of political life as devised by the Founding Fathers and expected daily by the average American.

Republican lawmakers we spoke with knew that naturalized Latin American immigrants and their offspring vote mostly for the Democratic Party, but still most of them (all except five) were unambiguously in favor of amnesty and of continued mass immigration (at least from Mexico). This seemed paradoxical, and explaining their motivations was more challenging. However, while acknowledging that they may not now receive their votes, they believed that these immigrants are more malleable than the existing American: That with enough care, convincing, and "teaching," they could be converted, be grateful, and become dependent on them. Republicans seemed to idealize the patron-client relation with Hispanics as much as their Democratic competitors did. Curiously, three out of the five lawmakers that declared their opposition to amnesty and increased immigration (all Republicans), were from border states.

Eventually the Roman people got used to the idea that they were dependent on the government to take care of them for everything, and that they had no real personal responsibility for their own lives. That decadence inclined toward fall.

2. There are myriad reasons for Rome's fall, but one important one was Rome's loss of ability to control the inflow of barbarian tribes, and to assimilate them. Note well, Rome had for quite some time been bringing barbarians into its territory, and making them citizens. Things got out of control when Rome could no longer determine the rate of inflow, and no longer had the power to compel them to assimilate to Roman norms.

3. The enormous tax burden on the populace -- and the unfairness of it, as the wealthy managed to escape much of it -- deeply damaged the Roman state. The Roman people were bled dry to support the responsibilities of the state -- chiefly its military commitments. The US, I would say, faces more of a problem in the immediate future from having to pay its social entitlements to the retiring Boomers. As enormous as the military budget is, and will continue to be, the coming tidal wave of Social Security and Medicare is going to eventually outstrip the Pentagon's budget. We are going to have to tax ourselves into the ground to pay for this ... or not pay for it at all. And the political class can't bring itself to deal with the problem, nor, it seems, can the people who send them to Washington.

4. Edward Gibbon, from his "Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire":

Prosperity ripened the principle of decay; the causes of destruction multiplied iwth the extent of conquest; and, as soon as time or accident had removed the artificial supports, the stupendous fabric yielded to the pressure of its own weight.

5. Gibbon again, on withdrawing his support for the British crown's campaign to suppress the rebellion in the American colonies:

I shall scarcely give my consent to exhaust still farther the finest country in the World in the prosecution of a War, from whence no reasonable man entertains any hope of success. It is better to be humbled than ruined.

How do you say "Ahem" in Arabic?

6. From Murphy's book:

In Rome, virtus was inextricably bound up with the ideology of Rome's greatness. Here is the Roman legend as one historian sums it up: "A simple, hardy race of peasants, long uncontaminated by the seductive arts and manners of Greece, they hald fast to their rustic virtues: sanctity of family life, sobriety of conduct and demeanor, a stern sense of discipline. ... In consequence of these virtues the Romans achieved their mission, divinely inspired, to rule the world." These were seen to be the values of Rome especially in its republican days, and they were the values the Founding Fathers believed Americans at their best embodied. They're still the values we look back on wistfully.

Are we Rome? That is to say, have we gone soft?

7. When faced with threats to its security, the frightened Roman republic began to cede power to the unitary executive, and lost its freedom. Murphy sees parallels between that process and what's happened in the US since 9/11.

8. The Romans were supremely arrogant, and thought that the world was as they thought it was -- and when it wasn't, they could create reality. Murphy says that attitude clearly informs the US now: "Across the board it fosters the conviction that assertions of will can trump assessments of reality: the world is the way we say it is."

Similarly, the Romans were so impressed by themselves that they not only didn't care what other peoples thought, they didn't think they had much to learn from other peoples. This attitude led the Romans to discount important information. And, when wedded to Rome's sense of having a divinely appointed mission to conquer and civilize the world, Rome tended to see information contrary to its wishes and desires as not only wrong (if it saw the information at all), but as somehow malign.
Yet like us, Rome saw it as possible for all people to become Roman, because it is entirely natural for people, if they understood that their best interests and their own perfected nature, led toward Roman-ness.

This has all kinds of parallels to contemporary America. Murphy: "Human nature, in other words, is basically American. This may be a comforting sentiment, but it can end up enabling just as much ignorance as arrogance or disdain does." This is especially true if your understanding of the American character is warped by sentimentality and idealism -- that is, if you discount the struggles we've had with the better angels of our nature.

9. The growing rift between the military and its culture, versus the culture of the people they serve, is also characteristic of decadent Rome. About us, Murphy writes, "Military society is orderly and disciplined; it grapples openly and pragmatically with tough issues of ecucation, family life, poverty and class." The rest of us? Not so much.

10. The Roman government became besotted with patronage, bribery and featherbedding -- a practice that Murphy sees replicated in our political system being awash in campaign contributions buying access and favors. Indeed, here in Istanbul I was talking to a US scholar who has been involved with policymaking circles in Washington. He gave me a couple of examples of cases in which the taxpayer has been fleeced, and US national interests undermined, by the interaction of government with private business, for the sake of enriching business and political friends. If this gets out of hand, says Murphy, you have the fall of Rome.

In the end, Murphy says that we can avoid the fate of Rome through a conscious and determined program of reform, and the reclamation of Republican virtue. We are not fated to end up like Rome. The power to determine our fate rests largely with us Americans. But the signs don't look good.